19 May What is the answer to the congestion of cities?
Most major cities throughout the nation endure adverse congestion on their public roadways.
Urban mobility has seemingly been getting worse and worse, despite the increasing options for getting around town.
It takes forever to get to your destination. Even simple trips are exceedingly exhausting.
Could self-driving cars make a difference and potentially help to eliminate such congestion?
There are various experts that keep touting the aspect that there will never be congested traffic after the advent of self-driving cars, especially if we are talking about the great Level 5.
For the ones that don’t know what level 5 means, let me explain a little bit what I am talking about.
The official scoring system, promulgated by the SAE (Society for Automotive Engineers), indicates that a Level 5 is essentially a truly driverless car, one that has the AI driving the car and there is no need for a human driver.
The Level 5 self-driving car has either passengers in it or could be empty and simply be cruising around to its next designated destination, but there is no requirement that a human driver is present.
In fact, the odds are that the Level 5 self-driving car won’t have any driving controls for humans, thus, any human driver is precluded from driving even if they want to.
I won’t stop explaining the rest of the levels, because it is not a matter of this post. But if you want to know what they consist of, you can download an infographic I prepared for you.
Getting back to our matter, there are various experiments that have been done on special closed tracks trying to gauge whether AI-driven cars can maneuver in a fashion that will avert traffic snarls.
If you had exclusively self-driving cars, they indeed would seem to be able to drive in a smoother manner than humans do, being able to maintain a proper distance between cars and adjusting quickly to the flow of the cars ahead of them.
The problem here is that having a mix of human-driven cars and autonomous AI-driven cars, will last for quite a while.
Economically it is not feasible to toss away conventional cars and replace them with driverless cars and I don’t have any hope in trying to convert those conventional cars into autonomous cars.
There are more aspects of that mix that are not so promising, especially when it comes to dealing with human diversity. Among them we could mention:
- Divide roads into streets for self-driving cars and human-driven cars
- Establish certain hours in which humans can travel in cars driven by them.
- Determine areas where only self-driving cars are allowed
- Charging a rate similar to what is today called a congestion charge, which means that if you are using a car on certain roads at certain times, you will have to pay a special rate to do so.
In addition to this are the people who choose to resolve the issue using only public transport.
And let’s not forget to mention all the computer security issues that technologies carry.
As a conclusion, it is possible that this 5 level self-driving car could be proposed as a solution, but we must consider the shock that this technology can bring to society, we know that there has always been a resistance towards the new and the idea of being replaced by artificial intelligence, it is a long way to go .
Meanwhile we can continue dreaming of a closer solution, finally we are a humanity that has achieved great things.
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